[Onedown]

Our bridge club is setting up a number of special events, virtual live events where our club/country. Costa Rica will play matches with other countries same time say day but they remain in their country and we remain in ours but all players will play on BBO from their respective club with laptops logging into BBO...how do we configure 1 WIFI to handle this?

[Hanoi5]

I think there are three issues:

- There have to be good computers/laptops for the 12 people involved. When I say good I mean capable of connecting to internet through WiFi and capable of managing new browsers or the BBO program.
- The internet connection has to be good. I'm not sure how good but there'll be 12 machines (at least) connected to the internet sending and receiving information, if you don't want everybody with a red dot you better have at least 1 mbps.
- For ethical reasons get some sort of Director at the site so that s/he keeps order.

[Onedown]

Good points and we are covering all those concerns, I was more concerned with BBO allowing all the logins. And yes we will have a Director and a webcam of the room all through the match.

 Hanoi5, on 2011-June-03, 20:10, said:

I think there are three issues:

- There have to be good computers/laptops for the 12 people involved. When I say good I mean capable of connecting to internet through WiFi and capable of managing new browsers or the BBO program.
- The internet connection has to be good. I'm not sure how good but there'll be 12 machines (at least) connected to the internet sending and receiving information, if you don't want everybody with a red dot you better have at least 1 mbps.
- For ethical reasons get some sort of Director at the site so that s/he keeps order.

[diana_eva]

BBO allows 12 + people to connect simultaneously. Unless i am missing something, this is not a BBO thing. I don't know what are the limitations for wifi though.

[FrancesHinden]

I don't believe BBO have any constraints. We've had 4 people logged on to BBO from our house before through wifi on a normal home broadband connection with no problems.
The biggest problem we've had has been dodgy wireless cards in elderly computers.

[Onedown]

 diana_eva, on 2011-June-04, 00:23, said:

BBO allows 12 + people to connect simultaneously. Unless i am missing something, this is not a BBO thing. I don't know what are the limitations for wifi though.

My bad Diana and thanks for replying. My mind got twisted a bit as I was relating it to the BIL when I wanted to log in from my PC with 2 accounts for teaching purposes.

[diana_eva]

 Onedown, on 2011-June-04, 05:28, said:

My bad Diana and thanks for replying. My mind got twisted a bit as I was relating it to the BIL when I wanted to log in from my PC with 2 accounts for teaching purposes.

There are limitations as you cannot log in with several usernames from the same computer. But you can log in from the same internet connection, from different computers. That's not a problem from BBO side.As i said before, i am not sure if the wifi connection can handle 12 logins simultaneously. Maybe ask Gerardo if you see him online. He's the expert in this area.

[Mbodell]

 diana_eva, on 2011-June-04, 06:29, said:

There are limitations as you cannot log in with several usernames from the same computer. But you can log in from the same internet connection, from different computers. That's not a problem from BBO side.As i said before, i am not sure if the wifi connection can handle 12 logins simultaneously. Maybe ask Gerardo if you see him online. He's the expert in this area.

I'd imagine this has happened in the past fairly often with multiple vugraph operators plus other bridge players logging on from a single hotel/conf room wifi connection.

[Onedown]

Can anyone with good WiFi knowledge, suggest a piece of WiFi hardware or different ones which will support at least 20 connections that are all in one room from 20 separate PCs and maintain a good signal to BBO.

[G_R__E_G]

The number of devices is not going to exceed the maximum allowed on any recently made router. They can generally handle an absolute minimum of 256 devices simultaneously (I think in our house we have around 20 at a time with the laptops, netbooks, iPod Touches, Nintendo DS's, Wii and PS3 - we have four kids). Just make sure that you get yourself a good quality N router like a D-Link DIR-825. Your main issue will most likely be your internet connection speed rather than the router.

With all of that said, if the proximity of the laptops allows it I'd really recommend a wired solution using a router and switches. No disconnects to contend with.

[mycroft]

We had 20+ in one site with BBO in a test for the D18 GNTs, no problem.

It's a good idea to have a wireless router with some spare wired ports - maybe even bring in an 8-port switch to add to it - in case of dodgy/no wireless cards.

BBO doesn't use much throughput - lag and latency is more of a problem, and the number of computers in one site isn't going to affect that. 20 people watching/playing BBO isn't going to use as much bandwidth as one person playing WoW - not by a long shot.

The big thing about BBO on laptops is - unless you're very used to it, DON'T USE THE TRACKPAD. Even if you are very used to it, don't use it. Bring a pluggable mouse - and in fact, we brought 7 or 8 for people who showed up without one.

[mgoetze]

 mycroft, on 2011-June-06, 10:48, said:

The big thing about BBO on laptops is - unless you're very used to it, DON'T USE THE TRACKPAD.

I don't see the problem. I mean, obviously some people use a very silly configuration where simply tapping on the tracking area will be interpreted as a button press, but that is horrible for everything, not just BBO.

[phil_20686]

In my experience routers sometimes have problems sustaining more than 8 simultaneous connections without dropping connections. Maybe I just buy cheap routers. You can get around this by using some people on wired lines, or by using more than one wireless access point.

EDIT: The number of DNS addresses is normally irrelevant, being >> than thte number of devices it can practically sustain. A wireless router runs at the speed of the slowest wireless card connected to the network, and in practice a wireless router can only transmit on one frequency at a time so it transmits to one and then cycles to the next one and so on. Fortuntely it does this very fast, and the wireless network is normally much faster than the internet connection, but with many devices attached, particularly older model wireless cards, the latency can be enough to start getting computers dropped. Again, I suspect that having a better router would help. I definitely would not guarantee a single wireless access point to handle 20 devices simultaneously.

[mycroft]

 mgoetze, on 2011-June-06, 12:30, said:

I don't see the problem. I mean, obviously some people use a very silly configuration where simply tapping on the tracking area will be interpreted as a button press, but that is horrible for everything, not just BBO.

And of course, that's the default that all computer OS systems are set up with, and if you're not very experienced with the trackpad, you won't know that you have to reconfigure that, or even that you can.

Yes, I know you're snarking, and I'm happy to snark with you, but that is in fact important for the new system people.

[hotShot]

We had 40 people with laptops surfing the internet, exchanging photos and other files using a simple WLAN 8 years ago.

I can't imagine that a modern wireless router should have trouble with 20 connections.
Usually the internal speed of a router is relevant, but this can't be a problem if everybody is playing on BBO.

The average datarate for a BBO conection is about 0.5 kb/second.
20 BBO -connections will need about 10 kb / second.
But the WebCam will need some bandwidth, so you might have a problem with the upload speed if you only have a 1Mbit ADSL, but 2Mbit should be save.

You might get problems with simultanious logins, because the BBO-Webinterface software might be updated. on all 20 laptops simultaneously

So you should make the players log in early.